Hello and welcome to our newsletter, designed to keep you up to date with news and information from PaPaS.
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We are currently in the final stages of our NIHR Programme Grant (see here), due to complete in June 2017. There may be some delay to reviews that do not fall under this grant as we prioritise accordingly. As always, we will endeavour to ensure all reviews are managed as efficiently as possible, but we thank you for your patience during this time. If you have any questions or concerns about your review, please do get in touch with Anna or Kerry.
PaPaS News
GRADE update
Our authors will be aware of our current guidance for reporting GRADE in protocols and reviews (see our guidance here). In 2016, new guidance was published (see here) which now describes GRADE as a method for assessing the certainty of the evidence. This is a change to the more established approach of using GRADE to assess the quality of the evidence. We are in the process of updating our guidance documents to include this new wording, but in the meantime you may wish to familiarise yourselves with the latest publication. Authors are free to adopt either approach, but we do encourage consistency between the protocol and review. Therefore, we would not recommend making any changes at review stage if the protocol planned to assess the 'quality' and not 'certainty'. If you have any questions, please do get in touch.
Structure and Function Review update
The review of Cochrane's organizational structure and functions is a Strategy to 2020 initiative to ensure our organizational structure is optimally aligned to our mission and goals. For a report on progress so far and what is planned for the next few months, please see here.
Cochrane Library DVD production
Please note that the Cochrane Library DVD has ceased production, the last available DVD is issue 4, 2016. Access is now online at www.cochranelibrary.org. See here for further details.
New updating policy
The Cochrane Editorial and Publishing Policy Resource was amended recently and now advises that 'a Cochrane Review should be updated based on need', rather than routinely every two years (see here). For further information on PaPaS policy see here.
Cochrane UK & Ireland Symposium 2017 - Cochrane: Through the Looking Glass
This year's symposium is based at Keble College, Oxford, 14th & 15th March 2017. Anna, Kerry and some of the PaPaS Editors will be attending and we'd love to see you there! See here for more details.
New version of ClinicalTrials.gov
A beta version of ClinicalTrials.gov is now available for testing here. The beta site will be available for at least one month to obtain feedback from the public. The new version of ClinicalTrials.gov was developed to provide new features to support searching for clinical studies.
RevMan Web: volunteers needed
Informatics & Knowledge Management Department (IKMD) are looking for volunteers to help with the design of RevMan web. They are particularly looking for experienced authors from around the globe to participate in a short web-based exercise. Please see here for more details.
Good Practice Corner
We would like to start sharing some good practice examples with you. The aim is to make our editorial processes more efficient and to improve both the author and editor experience.
Author responses to editorial comments
In our first example we show authors' responses to our editorial comments within the yellow notes in RevMan. See here for screenshots.
